Alfred Duggan

Alfred Duggan (1903–1964) was a British historian, archeologist and best-selling historical novelist during the 1950s. Although he was raised in England, Duggan was born Alfred Leo Duggan in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of wealthy landowners of Irish descent. His family relocated to England when he was two years old. His father Alfredo Hubert Duggan, a third-generation Irish Argentinian, was appointed during 1905 to the Argentine Legation in London, and died 1915. During 1917, his mother, the Alabama-born Grace Elvira Hinds, daughter of the U.S. Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, became the second wife of Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India. Duggan and his brother Hubert (1904–1943) were raised in England at Curzon's homes, and were educated, first at Eton, then Oxford University, where they became acquainted with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.

Alfred Duggan kept a car while at Oxford, one of the few students with sufficient funding to do this; the University Statutes prohibited undergraduate members of the University from keeping a car within a certain distance of the town centre at Carfax, so Duggan kept his vehicle, an early Rolls-Royce, just outside the limit of the jurisdiction of the University Proctors, and would regularly drive himself and his friends to and from London during the social season.

During 1938..1941 Duggan served with the London Irish Rifles, with active service in Norway. For the rest of World War II he worked in an airplane factory.